Tea App A Second Tea Breach Reveals Users’ DMs About Abortions and Cheating
Tea App A Second Tea Breach Reveals Users’ DMs About Abortions and Cheating
www.404media.co
A Second Tea Breach Reveals Users’ DMs About Abortions and Cheating
113 comments
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The company should be sued into the ground. This is horrendous
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In any other engineering discipline this would he negligence.
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It is negligence, but information workers have very little regulation when it comes to handling personal data (outside of specific fields, like healthcare and finance).
I say this as an information worker who handles a lot of personal data. Worst case scenario, I get fired and can't use them as a reference. Unless I'm intentionally stealing data and using it for crimes there's no risk of criminal penalties.
We needed privacy laws 20 years ago but the tech bros assured everyone that it would be fine and for a long time they were mostly responsible with our data. But now we're well into the enshittification of the Internet and the lack of regulation is allowing these kinds of harms to become common.
Though, in a sane regulatory framework Tea wouldn't be allowed to exist in the first place. The entire point of the site is to doxx people and share personal details about them without their consent.
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Both the company, for failing to protect its users; and a large majority of its users, for doxxing and libel.
Its unfortunate that it happened this way, but now the people who are being libeled against and doxxed have the ability to find out about it where they didn't before.
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I'm not going to hold it against women for having a private group to tell on predatory dudes when this existed and nobody ever faced any consequences. What We Learned About the 70K-Person Telegram Channel on How to Rape Women
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I mean, it's on brand. The doxxing app is successfully doxxing people...
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Nah, just stop using it. Sueing does nothing, it just benefits lawyers and not any of us.
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But it may hurt the creators who
A) Made this abhorrent shit to begin with
B) Didn't secure a goddamn thing and lied to users about the leaked info being deleted
so whether or not I benefit monetarily, I benefit by it being shut down and those responsible being held at least a little accountable for their various misdeeds to both their users and humanity at large. Plus that may serve as a deterrent for the next libel app that thinks they've reinvented facebook 1.0 (which, they might have some advice about this exact scenario, actually.)
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It sucks for those people, but everyone should expect anything they say online to be possibly tied back to them. Secrets and identification information don't mix. Especially online. The good news is that there is no evidence any of it is real, anyone can lie on the site saying whatever they want, so if doxed someone can just say they were bored and wanted to fit in and see what others were discussing or such. Hopefully for them it doesn't turn into people getting hurt for talking behind someone's back like it often does offline.
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fuck off with that complacency
there's so much underlying rules for private communication between computer systems, this type of thing is pure neglect boardering on international.
there's no reason to think everything online should be open and available. we should all be allowed to be in private spaces, especially if it's advertised as a private space
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Everyone is talking about the poor security practices, which is fair. Or they are talking about the appropriateness of such an app existing, which is also fair.
But the immediate take away should be, especially in today’s political environment, that we cannot and should not trust sensitive data that leaves our device, particularly if you are of any kind of non privileged group.
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This has been the case for a long time, so suddenly you have apps like Tea that encourage you to upload info of other people. So now even the few that take care not to upload their info can be nicely monitored. And the Gestapo does not even need to pay their informants for it.
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This sounds like victim-blaming. This website didn't even secure their database with a password. Come on. I'm sure their privacy policy gave the standard promises about storing their private data in a secure way, which they did not do.
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Encouraging people to be safe and care about their privacy on the internet is not victim blaming.
I'm sure their privacy policy gave the standard promises about storing their private data in a secure way, which _they did not do. _
This is what people want to warn others of. The developers of Tea are hardly the only offenders. Definitely not an example of victim blaming.
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In the current environment, at-risk people (women, immigrants, etc) who might have “at-risk” activities (abortion, immigration, etc) don’t have the luxury of relying on a privacy policy. I am not blaming them, I am simply stating how it must be if they are to avoid adverse actions.
This particular instance involved poorly secured data; what happens when warrantless demands are made by the government?
The Tea debacle proves that sensitive data cannot be trusted once out of your hands.
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I'm sure their privacy policy gave the standard promises about storing their private data in a secure way, which they did not do.
Their ToS can be found here. Section G of their Limitation of Liability tries to shield them from liability against data breaches. But if they were criminally negligent, the ToS won’t protect them. The Data Protection section basically just says “check our Privacy Policy for info on what we collect”, which is pretty standard fare for a ToS.
The Security section of their Privacy Policy is also extremely boilerplate. Here’s the entire thing:
Security of Your Personal Information
The security of your Personal Information is important to us. When you enter sensitive information (such as credit card number) on our Services, we encrypt that information using secure socket layer technology (SSL).Tea Dating Advice takes reasonable security measures to protect your Personal Information to prevent loss, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction. Please be aware, however, that despite our efforts, no security measures are impenetrable.If you use a password on the Services, you are responsible for keeping it confidential. Do not share it with any other person. If you believe your password has been misused, please notify us immediately.This one particular sentence may end up burning them though:
Tea Dating Advice takes reasonable security measures to protect your Personal Information to prevent loss, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction.
I think most people (and the courts) would agree that putting a password on your database is a reasonable security measure that would be expected per this Privacy Policy. Especially since their next sentence goes on to elucidate that users should keep their passwords confidential.
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This is why you don’t vibe code a webservice
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This wasn't vibe coding, it's incompetant devops.
You have to go out of your way to make these buckets public like this. Several giant "Everyone will have access to this" warnings, re-authentication, a permanent warning symbol on the dashboard AND regular e-mails reminding you that you have a public bucket. I don't even think you can do this via the API, it requires a human to manually make this setting.
I'm guessing that they couldn't figure out how to configure the Access Control Lists and just made it public so that it would work. That's fine in a test environment, without any user data but it's pure incompetence to have a production system setup this way.
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If I were in the security team of that company, I would never accept ACLs on the bucket as a sufficient compensating control for this risk. Here the
bestmost reasonable would be encryption, which would make the bucket being public relatively unimportant.When you are collecting so sensitive data (potentially including personal data of people not using your service), you simply can't even imagine doing that by storing the data unencrypted.
Edit: grammar
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Even an AI wouldn't do something this stupid.
Every piece of information it its data set about Firebase would have told it to secure the database.
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They hired an investigator? Any investigator worth a shit is gonna say that they're liable for failing to secure private data they collected,
as well as for retaining data they were apparently legally obligated to deleteEdit: Misread that segment, they actually presented it as if they were deleted to users, but apparently retained them to comply with vague "law enforcement requirements."
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"Sir, we've already been breached once!"
"But what about second breach?"
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Now there are two of them. A second breach has hit the app.
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This is why age verification is dangerous. If a company can just forget to delete you ID picture, it will happen...
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On the one hand, sucks that a leak like this even happens anymore, no one deserves to be doxxed like that. On the other hand, I struggle to feel bad for the users of the doxxing app getting doxxed in return...
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The Tea app is a women-only dating safety platform where members can share reviews about men, with access to the platform only granted after providing a selfie and government ID verification.
This sounds irresistible for angry misogynists. The only thing that surprises me about this is that it didn’t happen earlier.
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The only thing that surprises me about this is that it didn’t happen earlier.
I'm way out of the dating game at this point, and also a man, so it's very likely that I'm just out of the loop
But I hadn't heard anything about this app until a couple weeks ago when I saw an article or two about it
Then about a week later this happened
So I kind of feel like maybe most of the assholes who did this were similarly unaware of it until it got some exposure and then it was on their radar.
I would certainly imagine that most women using this app probably weren't telling the angry misogynists in their lives about this app.
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Ostensibly, a noble goal. Practice is a bit more fuzzy.
Also: nothing is ever new
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At least they’re honest, they did spill tea.
A whole lot of tea.
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Did they use Tea app to spill tea about the shitty security practices of Tea app? Do they spill tea there about the app's founder, Sean Cook, and frivolous claims of a safe space that preserves anonymity?
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Don't want your information on the internet? don't upload it to anyone on or over the internet, it really is a fucking simple concept.
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Fucking simple concept which major businesses are economically compelled to gaslight you out of.
So the problem is in economics.
Each such business provides all of their infrastructure, expensive, good and well-maintained (Google has its own Internet cables), which is not separated from their application services.
So one provider of infrastructure (in the wide sense, solving all the problems) usually serves many users of their own application and many application providers (I'm inventing terms) without their own infrastructure.
While user of an application generally can't switch infrastructure providers as they want. It's kinda technically fine and normal (there are NTP server pools, one could in the olden days search many FTP servers for the needed file, and so on), but doesn't happen IRL. Because there's no standard way for pooling resources and tracking them, and there's no applications using it.
So - the data model (cryptographic global person identities, globally identified by some derived hash posts (a post is, say, datetime, author, some tags, content, hash of it all, signatures, I dunno) (creation of a group or a vote or a changing of privileges or moderation can be a post too), for forming a representation for the user a group is "replayed" in the right order to know which user had a privilege to, say, moderate posts etc ; one can also generate group snapshots from time to time when replaying thus, by the group owner identity, to make it faster) is orthogonal to the service model. That's important so that it were fit for alternative service models, like sneakernet or offline-enabled mesh or anything delay-tolerant. Or at least a p2p kademlia DHT-based service model.
The service model - the core of it all is a tracker service. It works like a tracker in BitTorrent (or maybe Hotline, but that's old), except with signed announces, and it tracks search and storage and relay and maybe even computation services (which announce themselves to it). A search service gets storage services from trackers and indexes their contents (one can even announce objects to a search service similarly to trackers, might be better) to search by tags. A storage service just stores objects and yields them. A relay service must be harder, you the user must somehow announce (to trackers too?) which relay service you are registered on at this moment, a bit like SIP or like SMTP (only very temporary), so that messages to that relay service would reach you.
The client would just request a bunch of trackers for all things they need - to search for stuff for services, then request these services and merge their results. Forming a group representation is "searching for stuff" too, and then getting the objects referenced by index service responses from a bunch of storage services. To notify another user that you've sent them a message one can use a relay service.
I think it's easy to see that it's kinda primitive other than requiring proper cryptography. And it's a global system working over the Internet (except no, it doesn't exist). Similar to NOSTR, but I think better due to separation of data model and service model.
The advantages of this - one still can make any kinds of applications using such common infrastructure, but the resource-based feudalism we have this might hurt. Similar to how BitTorrent keeps working despite quite a few people not liking it.
The disadvantages - well, stuff will get lost, there are paid BT trackers but no paid BT peers, while in such a system paid storage and other services would be a thing (still much better than Facebook).
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And live in a cave! 😬
It would be nice if also they secured data too.
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don't upload it to the internet!
or use a smart phone
or corporate searches that track you
or go to any website with ads - they track you
hell don't even search the internet! your ISP tracks dns requests
or use a modern tv that tracks what is on your screen
or you can do custom phone from - just unlock the bootloader, root it, and install! then just setup pihole/adguard/self-host everything
it's simple, for privacy just go live in a yurt in the woods to not be tracked 24/7
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Posted on an article about an app encouraging different users to upload info about you without your consent. Yes, really simple.
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I strangle anyone who sees my face.
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its like the ashley madison drama, which exposed cheating.
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I was today years old when I learned that Ashley Madison is still in operation
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There's money in extortion, who knew!
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Sir, a second plane.meme
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If you're out of the loop, I found this article fairly helpful for a primer on the issues. It's CNN, but I can't be arsed to find a more kosher source.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/25/us/tea-app-dating-privacy-cec
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404media did a great piece about what happened. available as podcast too. https://www.404media.co/a-second-tea-breach-reveals-users-dms-about-abortions-and-cheating/
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Was this app made by misogynists? Did they "accidentally" fuck up on purpose?
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No, the direct opposite
Doesn't matter what side you're on, when you're extremist, you're extremist
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Yeah, first time is an accident. Second time, though...?
I do try not to attribute to malice anything that can be adequately explained by stupidity. At the end of the day, I don't think it really matters. This level of stupidity is gross negligence, and they need to get sued through the floor.
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that’s my theory. how can you be so grossly negligent to expose all your data with no ACLs. especially when collecting personal identification
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Gross irresponsibility wouldn't be unheard of for an unscrupulous "tech capitalist" who's better at promoting by overpromising safety & security & rushing out half-baked minimum viable junk instead of properly implementing it.
Still, someone malicious could as easily do the same in an atmosphere of declining tech savvy.
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I never thought there would be a dating intel war going on and this the second time too.
113 comments